Remembering Reptilian Records

Remembering Reptilian Records
Fell's Point, Baltimore, 1990s

As I get older, I find myself thinking back to those days, over 30 years ago, when I was a graduate student living in Baltimore. I didn't have much money, so I was on the lookout for cheap thrills. And a good place to find them was a dark and anarchistic little boutique in the city's Fell's Point neighborhood: Reptilian Records. 

Back then, Baltimore was known as 'Charm City', as well as 'The City that Reads', the latter slogan dreamed up by a tourism and marketing campaign (the slogan quickly was transformed into 'The City that Breeds' by knowledgeable Baltimoreans and urban hipsters). The city was comparatively safer than it is nowadays, although you took care in where you went after dark.

There still were working-class redoubts in the northern and eastern parts of the city, in neighborhoods like Highlandtown, Hampden, Roland Park, Keswick, and Dundalk, while in the downtown area, the Inner Harbor remained a major tourist draw. Some of the best pizza in the city could be had at Matthew's, on Eastern Avenue in Highlandtown.

Reptilian opened in November, 1989, at 403 South Broadway Street and quickly became the 'in' place to go for vinyl, and later CDs, in the genres of punk, thrash metal, speed metal, and the burgeoning grunge rock movement. Since I was 31 when I began patronizing Reptilian late in 1991, I was a little too old and set in my ways to have much interest in bands like Fugazi. 

But along with records, Reptilian also sold the more offbeat comic books, graphic novels, magazines, and the occasional book. You could find the latest issue of comics from Dark Horse, Eclipse, Tundra, Kitchen Sink, and other indie publishers, along with higher-end publications like 'Raw'. They had boxes stuffed with ultraviolent, 'transgressive' black-and-white horror comics from quasi-underground publishers like Northstar.

I have fond memories of visiting Reptilian on gray, drizzly, cold days, or in searingly hot summer days, and coming away with 'Aliens' comics from Dark Horse, 'Black Hole' and 'Death Rattle' from Kitchen Sink, a copy of 'Taboo', Robert Crumb's 'Hup' comics, and much other worthy material that now is stored in boxes in my basement.

Back in the early 1990s, Fell's Point was gentrifying, but slowly, and the profuse commercialization that now marks the area didn't exist. There still was a seedy ambience to the neighborhood, and back then, crime wasn't anywhere near as bad as it is nowadays. So I could park my car on side streets and not risk having it broken in to, or being mugged walking around Fell's Point.

When I came away from Reptilian with several packs of the infamous 'True Crime' trading cards, issued in late 1992 by comics publisher Eclipse, it seemed right and proper that I acquired them in Fell's Point, and not in some more presentable, upscale vending place.......

I patronized Reptilian until I left Baltimore early in 1997. The store eventually left its Fell's Point location for a storefront on North Howard Street, and closed for good in January 2009. The store's somewhat eccentric owner, 'Chris X', aka Chris Neu, converted his operation to a mail order / online vendor. Reptilian continues to this day as a producer and publisher of punk rock as custom vinyl LPs, and CDs. Their Facebook page is here. 

I'd buy a Reptilian Records tee shirt, but the days when I could wear a XXL size comfortably are long gone............sigh.......

I guess the message is, treasure those offbeat, crowded, dimly lit, overly loud little stores and vendors who are dedicated to the fringes of popular culture, because they are places you really will miss when they close.

The Myron Fass Fan Club

The Myron Fass Fan Club

Jeff Goodman was a staffer at Countrywide Publications, the publishing company run by schlock magazine mogul Myron Fass (March 29, 1926 - September 14, 2006). 

Fass started in print media in the 1950s as an artist in comic books, before teaming up early in the 1960s with Stanley Harris to create a line of girlie magazines. 

Fass's stance of churning out magazines to emulate whatever else on the newsstands was selling well, was highly successful. During the 1970s and on into the 1980s, Countrywide titles devoted to horror, crime, UFOs, and all manner of ephemeral pop culture phenomena made the company one of the nation's most lucrative magazine publishers. In the mid-80s Fass moved to Florida and, using the name 'Merion Riley-Foss', launched a new magazine venture under the rubric of a company titled 'Creative Arts'. Fass died at age 80 in Fort Lauderdale.

Goodman maintains a Facebook page devoted to Fass and the schlock magazine publishing industry. He provides lots of vintage photographs, observations, and anecdotes about the personalities that worked at Countrywide and in print media at large during the 70s, 80s and 90s. 

Goodman's remarks often are humorous and affectionate, but at times, filled with pathos, too. This is his reminiscence of a late 1990s encounter with Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione's wife, and the editor of Omni magazine, Kathy Keeton:

One day I was at Guccione's Upstate NY mansion. I used to buy stolen bottles of wine from a Saint Mark's Place crackhead, and he sold me a crazy expensive bottle of Chateau d'Yquem for $10. I brought it to Guccione's house. He made a pasta lunch and I gave him the bottle of Chateau d'Yquem. From that moment on, my standing was highly elevated with Guccione.

 

I was walking around the house during an afternoon. It was terrible hot, a broiling summer day. I came across Kathy Keeton pulling weeds from her vegetable garden. She was furiously pulling the weeds, robotically, like a mad woman. She was drenched in sweat.

"I have all this." she said, pointing at the mansion, the pool, the gardens. "I have what I wanted and I'm going to die. I have cancer. Why am I going to die?"

Then she went back to furiously pulling weeds. I said something probably silly, something like "You never know what will happen. These things don't always go the way that doctors tell you."

I didn't know anything about cancer at the time. She didn't look sick. I don't really remember the rest of the day. I thought about this all that week.

A few months later, I saw Kathy Keeton on a TV show and she talked about how she was cured. She had hooked up with some quack who was giving her some sort of chemical that was a component of rocket fuel called hydrazine sulfate. She was beaming, she was sure she had been cured by the rocket fuel.

She dropped dead a week later.

Penthouse magazine March 1975

 Penthouse magazine, March 1975

Let's go back in time to March, 1975, where Spring is in the air, and the latest issue of Penthouse magazine is on the stands.

The 'Forum' showcases the usual deviants: 

The height of fashion is owning a pair of Dingo boots........made with denim (?!) and leather:

And, in those innocent days of 1975, you could mail-order counterfeit guns !

And, for a fee, a Real Artist could draw dirty pictures for you ! 

The Pictorials are very much all about the 'soft focus erotica' sensibility pioneered by David Hamilton..........

There's a pictorial featuring a supple young woman posing next to exercise equipment........?!

The articles feature a humorous piece, by Henry Morgan, on the Irish (March has St. Patrick's Day, after all). The illustration is by Mercer Mayer, who was well-known for illustrating the 'Great Brain' books, by John D. Fitzgerald, that were popular in the 1970s.

The Interview features writer and journalist Louis 'Studs' Terkel. Terkel, who carefully cultivated an image of himself as an ally of the Proletariat, has pretty much faded as a newsworthy personality, but back in '75, he was quite the social critic.

There's a piece penned by a self-titled 'male hustler'. I'm sure everything he says is true !

And for the cartoons, we have a proto-Beavis saying crude things to a bewildered child........?! Along with a 'gay' cartoon that likely would not pass muster nowadays.

And there you have it, vintage smut from 1975.

Book Review: A Dream of Kinship

Book Review: 'A Dream of Kinship' by Richard Cowper

3 / 5 Stars

'A Dream of Kinship' (240 pp.) was published by Pocket Books / Timescape in August, 1981. The cover artist is uncredited.

This is the second book in the so-called 'White Bird of Kinship' trilogy. The initial volume in the trilogy is 'The Road to Corlay' (1978) and the final volume, 'A Tapestry of Time', was published in 1982.

My review of 'The Road to Corlay' is available here.

'Richard Cowper' was the pen name of the UK writer John Middleton Murry, Jr. (1926 - 2002).

'Dream' opens in 3019 AD, just after the events of 'The Road to Corlay'. The Kinship, a sort of post-Christian sect heavily imbued with humanism, is under persecution by the Catholic Church and its head inquisitor, the malevolent Lord Constant. Across the archipelagos that constitute the former British Isles and northern France, the agents of Lord Constant maneuver to detect and extirpate the followers of the White Bird (the talisman of the Kinsman, and a sort of New Age analogue to the Holy Spirit).

Corlay, a city in Brittany, is under secular protection and seemingly safe from the actions of the Church. However, in the opening chapters of 'Dream' we are introduced to the Magpie, an enigmatic soldier of fortune and convert to the Kinship. The Magpie has come to Corlay filled with a sense of unease, and anxious to see to the welfare of Jane, the young widow of Thomas of Norwich, an early acolyte of the faith and the man who best knew the boy Tom of Cartmel, the John-the-Baptist analogue introduced in 'Corlay'.

Jane and her circle are reluctant to believe that the Church would dare strike at them in the safety of Corlay. But as the Magpie is about to discover, it is not just the survival of the Kinship that is a stake, but the survival of the boy, Tom, that Jane soon is to birth. For Tom is to be no ordinary child, but one gifted with strange powers, powers for good, but also for ill. And the Lord Constant fears for the change that will overtake his world if Tom is allowed to live...... 

I gave 'The Road to Corlay' a three-star Rating and I am content with bestowing the same Rating for 'A Dream of Kinship.'

The opening chapters of 'Dream' are the best, being well-crafted in terms of building suspense and pathos unfolding amid the wintry hills and desolate fields of Brittany. 

The remaining two-thirds of the novel are considerably less dramatic, as they constitute a bildungsroman centered on the youth and maturation of Jane's son Tom, and his talent for piping songs that bring a sense of the otherworldy to his listeners. Interspersed with the adventures of Tom are incidents dealing with the at-times lethal geopolitics of the Kingdoms making up what used to be the British Isles. 

Curiously, in 'Dream', author Cowper abandons the science fiction sub-plot present in 'Corlay.' I found this improved the novel, allowing Cowper to focus more fully on his pastoral, post-apocalyptic civilization, which he depicts with considerable affection. 

Summing up, those who read 'The Road to Corlay' will want to pursue this second volume in the trilogy. It's a fantasy novel with a skillful prose style on the part of author Cowper. However, 'A Dream of Kinship' does have a deliberate, character-centered pacing, and those accustomed to the broader and more exciting scale of 'epic' fantasy storytelling may find 'Dream' to be lacking in this regard.

Book Review: The Faded Sun: Kesrith

Book Review: 'The Faded Sun: Kesrith' by C. J. Cherry

2 / 5 Stars

‘The Faded Sun: Kesrith’ (252 pp.) is DAW Book No. UE1600 and was published in August 1978. The cover illustration is by Dino D’Achille. It’s the first book in the so-called ‘mri’ trilogy, with the other volumes ‘The Faded Sun: Shon'jir’ (1978) and ‘The Faded Sun: Kutath’ (1979).

Some 20 years ago I started to read ‘Kesrith’, got about half-way through it, and was so bored, I gave up on the book. In the spirit of completion, I recently decided to attempt ‘Kesrith’ again, and this time I persevered all the way to the end…………

Following the publication of ‘Dune’ in 1965, detailed depictions of alien societies, psychologies, and social mores became a major theme in sci-fi. An unwritten rule became commonplace, that exposition on aliens be rendered in stilted, formalistic prose. Nouns associated with alien societies were capitalized, aliens rarely used contractions in their speech, and all manner or esoteric and arcane mannerisms by aliens were used to propel narratives about perplexed Terrans, or outsiders, struggling to comprehend these mysterious entities. The apogee of this stylistic attitude came with Donald Kingsbury’s 1982 novel ‘Courtship Rite’.

Author Carolyn Janice Cherry (b. 1942) took these conventions to heart. Many of her sci-fi novels deal with humans / Terrans who through misadventure find themselves submerged in alien societies. Often, if they are to survive, these Terrans must overcome hostility or indifference from their hosts. 

‘Kesrith’ plainly is modeled on ‘Dune’, and while this is not a bad thing, the fact is that the book is too slowly paced, and too dependent on characterization and world-building, to be effective.

The eponymous planet is a Dune-style desert world, an armpit of the galaxy. Some Fremen-like, Vaguely Arab, Vaguely Muslim tribesmen, known as the mri, eke out a squalid existence as mercenaries to a more sophisticated, but risk-averse race of aliens known as the regul.

 

The war between the regul – waged through their mri intermediaries – and humans has gone badly for the regul, and as ‘Kesrith’ opens, the regul are in the process of abandoning their operations on Kesrith and turning the planet over to the Federation. The mri are less than pleased with the thought of being deserted by their hereditary allies, and the enclave on Kesrith is beset with considerable angst. 

Things don’t improve when a duo of Terrans, the taciturn diplomat George Stavros and his aide-de-camp Sten Duncan, arrive on Kesrith as barely-tolerated guests of the regul. As the narrative progresses, there are fractious interactions between the regul, mri, and humans, interactions that have ominous implications for the frail reality of the truce between regul and humans. Will the mri survive the conflicts roiling Kesrith, or find their race exterminated ? 

From its opening page, ‘Kesrith’ smothers the reader with alien-culture motifs. There is a barrage of invented words, some with apostrophes to lend them a Vaguely Arabic flavor. The dialogue is reliant on an enigmatic diction, leaving the reader with the unenviable job of trying to parse the meanings behind what is being said. Making things worse, it’s not just the mri culture that gets this treatment, but the regul do as well. 

I could tolerate the verbiage if the lead characters have some redeeming qualities, but sadly, in ‘Kesrith’, they don’t. The mir characters Niun and Melein, and the Terran protagonist Sten Duncan, are very dumb, and I found myself indifferent to their fates. Indeed, I found the novel’s most interesting characters to be the bearlike 'dus', indigenous mammals who have something of a Companion Animal relationship with the prickly, peevish mri.

Nothing of consequence happens until Chapter Sixteen (page 172), two-thirds of the way through the book. Thus, the reader must invest quite a bit of his or her time before things even start to get interesting.

I finished 'The Faded Sun: Kesrith' with no burning desire to advance to the next volume in the trilogy. I'd be interested to hear if any PorPor followers believe that ‘The Faded Sun: Shon'jir’ is an improvement. Or is it just more of the same...........?!

At Cupboard Maker Books

At Cupboard Maker Books
Enola, PA

Cupboard Maker Books is a used bookstore located in Enola, Pennsylvania, a town on the western shore of the Susquehanna River, across the river from Harrisburg. It's at 157 North Enola Rd, also known as Route 15, which in turn is directly accessible from exit 65 on Interstate 81. Cupboard Maker Books is not hard to miss: it has a uniquely colorful storefront (above).

It's across the street from a train yard (below).

On the day in early March that I visited, they were having a 33% off promotion for science fiction and fantasy titles.

It's a pretty big place, lots of aisles, lots of books, both hardcover and paperback.

The section devoted to sci-fi is extensive, both for hardbound and paperback books. They also have a dedicated section for horror fiction, something of a rarity in used bookstores.

There are at least two cats on the premises, although one was apparently in quarantine........?!

Most paperbacks are $3 each. I came away with a good selection of regular Old School potboilers (two with an emphasis on teen pregnancies ?!), and a couple of vintage science fiction titles:

When you're done at Cupboard Maker and you are wanting a bite to eat, I recommend Al's of Hampden, a brewpub that serves good pizza, sandwiches, salads, and appetizers. They have a large selection of craft beers of tap, too. At 2240 Millennium Way in Enola, in back of the Weiss market, they are a short drive from exit 61 off of Interstate 81.

Book Review: Interzone: The 1st Anthology

Book Review: 'Interzone: The 1st Anthology' 

edited by John Clute, Colin Greenland, and David Pringle

3 / 5 Stars

'Interzone: The 1st Anthology' (202 pp.), was published by Everyman Paperbacks (UK) in 1985. The uninspired cover art was done by Robert Mason. The anthology was edited by John Clute, Colin Greenland, and David Pringle. It compiles a number of novelettes and short stories that saw print in the UK magazine Interzone during the interval from 1982 to 1985. 

[ Interzone still is going strong today, 40 years after it started.]

I cheerfully admit that I picked up this anthology with low expectations, as my other foray into mid-80s UK sci-fi, the collection 'Other Edens', was a disappointing assembly of outdated, warmed-over New Wave stories.

My capsule summaries of the contents:

Happy Day !, by Geoff Ryman, is a novelette that appeared for the first time in this anthology. It's set in a near-future USA, where women have taken control, and macho men are systematically being exterminated, since, as one observer remarks, 'men are violent'. The 'Boys' are a detachment of gay men who agree to assist with the extermination process, in exchange for being allowed to live. 

Rich, the first-person narrator, decides to extend fellowship in the Boys to an alienated wanderer named Royce; this has consequences for the future of the group. This novelette tries very hard to be transgressive, calling to mind Harlan Ellison stories from the 1970s and 1980s. The homosexual cohort described in 'Happy Day' are not pleasant people, and their portrayal likely would be considered politically incorrect (even offensive) by modern standards. 

The Cabinet of Edgar Allan Poe, by Angela Carter: a 'fabulation' that deals with the relationship between the writer and his mother, amid the poverty, disease, and premature death commonplace in 19th century America. It's fully as dreary as it sounds. 

The Flash! Kid, by Scott Bradfield: a snotnosed delinquent named Rudy McDermott discovers something alien and unknowable inside a termite nest, and the World is never the same. This story tries to emulate the comedic sci-fi of Robert Sheckley and Ron Goulart, and if you like that kind of stuff, then you might like 'The Flash! Kid'. I didn't.

After-Images, by Malcolm Edwards: when World War Three arrives, by some freakish phenomenon of physics, a small English town survives immolation. Or has it ? A great story, and one of my 'Top 21' horror stories. Unfortunately author Edwards, a playwright, did not produce any more short fiction in his career, preferring instead to work as an editor and critic.

Kitemaster, by Keith Roberts: in a vaguely post-apocalyptic UK, soldiers of the Church keep watch for incursions of 'demons' from the Badlands. This story later would be part of Roberts' 1985 fix-up novel 'Kiteworld'.

The Monroe Doctrine, by Neil Ferguson: it's an alternate 1968, and when the Russians invade Czechoslovakia, U.S. President Marilyn Monroe decides to meet face-to-face with Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev to advance the cause of World Peace. This story tries so hard to be cute n' sassy. It was author Ferguson's first published story.

Angel Baby, by Rachel Pollack: a teenaged girl is molested by an angel.....?! A provocative premise, but the story fails to capitalize on it. Most of 'Angel Baby' is devoted to documenting, via lengthy internal monologues, the angst of our stricken teen.

On the Deck of the Flying Bomb, by David Redd: the protagonist is a crewmember on the Mother of all Cruise Missiles. He is unhappy about the one-way nature of its mission. This is a figuration that is more of a fragment than a completed short story.

Cyberpunk maestro John Shirley provides 'What Cindy Saw', a variation on the theme of 'is someone crazy, or just gifted with the ability to see the underlying reality of the world' ? An early entry from Shirley, this story has a kind of crazed energy that makes it readable, if a little contrived.

The Object of the Attack, by J. G. Ballard: Dr. Richard Greville, psychiatrist, has a patient with severe antisocial tendencies. But perhaps that is a good thing ? One of Ballard's more accessible short stories, although its premise owes something to Stephen King's 1979 novel The Dead Zone.

Something Coming Through, by Cherry Wilder: in a near-future Arab city known as Deskar, Wheeler, an American, tries to save his relatives from execution for the crime of possessing  alcohol (Deskar has a quasi-Muslim sensibility). Can a local herb salve his misery ?

Dreamers, by Kim Newman: in the future, you can live vicariously by downloading and experiencing other people's dreams. John Yeovil has gotten rich off of specializing in porno dreams, and a new dream, featuring JFK and Marilyn Monroe, could make him very wealthy indeed.........this story has some interesting proto-cyberpunk concepts, but its overly wordy, and poorly organized, narrative ultimately fails to impress. 

Tissue Ablation and Variant Regeneration: A Case Report,  by Michael Blumlein: in the future, body parts can be used to improve the lives of impoverished Third World Peoples. But there's a catch............this story is disturbing and treads into splatterpunk territory (author Blumlein's 1990 anthology of horror stories, The Brains of Rats, got a rave review from the Too Much Horror Fiction blog).

Summing up, the entries by Ryman, Edwards, Roberts, and Blumlein lend sufficient value to earn 'Interzone: The 1st Anthology' a three-star Rating. If it helps, I'd say it's a bit superior to the equivalent mid-80s 'Annual World's Best SF' sci-fi anthologies published by DAW Books, but inferior to the 1986 cyberpunk collection 'Mirrorshades'.

Two sci-fi stories from Playboy, 1972

 Two sci-fi stories from Playboy, 1972

I'm not a big fan of comedic sci-fi stories, but the February, 1972 issue of Playboy magazine has two pretty good ones, including one by R. A. Lafferty, an author who usually does not impress me.

While Hugh Hefner liked sci-fi and routinely published the genre in Playboy, it was somewhat unusual to have two sci-fi tales in a given issue. As it happens, Hefner's judgment on these two entries was sound. They have the right length and tenor for the magazine as it was in the early 1970s: still genteel, but also cognizant that upstarts like Penthouse were changing the nature of the content in the men's magazine genre.

Perhaps because it was published in Playboy, Lafferty's story lacks the abstruse, self-consciously arty tenor of much of his fiction from the New Wave era. 'Rangle Dang Kaloof' is a short story about a man tormented by an imp. It works because it has the straightforward sensibility of a Roald Dahl tale.

The second entry, by Robert F. Young, takes as its title a phonetic play on the Mexican Mayan ruin Chichen Itza. 'Chicken Itza' is about the planet Sirius V, where a Federation initiative to 'civilize' the native Siw people has been implemented. A no-nonsense auditor named Firby is dispatched to Sirius V to review progress. Firby is astonished to find that the planet is a model of efficiency and modernization. Nothing seems to be amiss. How exactly did this happen...........?!

This is the first story I have read by Robert Young (1915 - 1986). It's a well-written story, and in my opinion superior to Lafferty's. 

According to his entry in the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Young was quite successful in publishing short stories in both genre and mainstream magazines and digests during the 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s. He also published four novels, 'Starfinder' (1980), 'The Last Yggdrasill' (1982),  'Eridahn' (1983), and 'The Vizier's Second Daughter' (1985). I well may investigate some of these.

Zippy's Day

Zippy's Day
by Bill Griffith

This brilliant little five-page comic, drawn in 1977 and featured in Zippy Stories (Last Gasp, 1986), features meticulous shading and cross-hatching by artist Griffith. 

Although word-less, it ably presents themes of humor, affection, a shade of pathos, and (in the darker scenes) even a bit of disquiet. In its draftsmanship and plotting, it is markedly superior to most of the indie comics being published nowadays.